Hello historians and welcome to today's history lesson.

I'm Mr. Moss and I'm incredibly passionate about history and I can't wait to teach you today.

With you today you need to bring your looking eyes, your listening ears, and your thinking brains, as well as that someone or something to talk to would be excellent and having something to write on and write with would also be really helpful.

All right, let's get straight into today's history lesson then.

I can't wait.

In this history lesson, we're going to be considering what childhood was like during the Victorian times.

The outcome will be, I can describe some of the jobs Victorian children had to do and what it was like for them.

Here are the key words for today's learning.

My turn, your turn.

Sources.

Brilliant, make sure I can hear you saying these back to me.

Mines and chimney sweep.

So let's have a chat about what these mean.

Sources are things from the past that as historians we can look at and use to try and find out what that time was like.

We are going to be looking at a variety of sources in today's lesson to learn what life was like for Victorian children.

Mines are deep holes dug in the ground to find precious materials like coal or metal.

Unbelievably, some children during the Victorian era worked in mines.

And someone who sweeps the soot out of chimneys is called a chimney sweep.

Houses in the Victorian era would often have a fireplace.

These fireplaces would be filled with this dark soot, and it would need cleaning out.

Unbelievably children were small enough to crawl up these chimneys to clean them out.

This was incredibly dangerous and we're going to be looking at this job today.

So remember today we are considering what Victorian childhood was like.

We're going to begin by considering why did Victorian children have to work and what type of jobs they did.

Let's get on with answering this question then.

Why did Victorian children have to work? So life for Victorian children was very different to how life for you is now.

Not all children in Victorian times were able to go to school.

In fact, it wasn't even within the law in the early Victorian period that all children have to go to school.

Many Victorian children needed to go to work instead.

They had to support their families with the small amount of money that they could make, especially within the lower classes.

"I can't imagine what I'd do if I didn't go to school", this child says.

Can you imagine what you would do if you didn't go to school? Can you imagine what your life would be like? Can you imagine if at your age you were thrust into work? Well, this was the reality for many Victorian children.

We can see here a painting of Victorian children with their tutor at home.

So it's not to say that all Victorian children didn't have access to an education, some did.

Children from wealthy families; and if you're wealthy, it means you have money to pay for things, often had a tutor, a person who would come and teach them, who was an adult, who would teach them at their house.

Children in poorer families though, children in the lower classes of society might have had the opportunity to go to a small local school on some days of the week, but may have had to work on other days of the week, or they may not have gone to school at all.

Some schools during this time were also attached to churches.

The quality of the education that the children from poor families would've gotten would've been far worse than that of the children of wealthy families.

So which statement is correct here? Lucas says all children went to school in the Victorian times.

Sam says lots of children had a job in Victorian times.

And June says there were no schools in Victorian times.

Read each statement.

Who do you think is correct? Off you go.

Great job.

You've clearly been paying a lot of attention.

So Lucas says all children went to school in the Victorian times.

Well, we know this is not true.

Unfortunately, many children, especially those from lower class and poorer backgrounds, did not have this opportunity.

In fact, lots of these children had to work.

So Sam is correct.

June says there were no schools in Victorian times.

Well, this is not true.

There were certain schools, schools attached to churches, other schools, but often these were only available to people who could pay or wealthy people.

Education at this time was often not free and was not accessible by all people.

So children from poor families had to work so that they could bring home some money.

The little amounts of money they earned, and believe me, they were not paid a lot of money, helped their family to buy the essential things they needed, like food.

These families were not wealthy, so they didn't have a lot of money to spend on the necessities.

Here we can see an illustration of Victorian children being paid for their work.

You can see the children in the background counting the meagre number of coins that they've been paid for their hard work.

Life in Victorian times was very hard for these poor children.

They received little to no education and had to do often backbreaking work.

There were different jobs that children could do to earn money depending on whether they lived in towns or in the countryside.

So, whether you lived in a town or you lived in the countryside, there was always work for children to do.

For example, in cities, children might have worked sweeping the streets, which would've been filthy.

And in the countryside, children worked on farms. I wonder where you would've preferred to work, in the city or in the countryside.

Here we can see a lithograph or an illustration of boys sweeping the streets.

We can see a wealthy man perhaps giving them a few coins.

We can see perhaps also that they're incredibly poor.

They have no shoes.

Their clothes are in rags.

This would've been tough work for little pay.

True or false, only Victorian children that lived in cities had to work.

Brilliant, absolutely.

This statement is false.

It is not true.

In Victorian times, children all around the country worked, whether they lived in towns and cities or in the countryside.

So no matter whether you lived in an urban area or in a rural area, there was always work to be found for children.

So for our practise task now, what I'd like is to put into practise the learning that we've just done.

Can you find the correct word to put at the end of each sentence? In Victorian times, not all children went to, mm.

In Victorian times, some children had to, mm.

Children needed to work to help their family earn, mm.

And our words are: work, money and school.

Show your understanding now by matching these sentences to the words that complete them and say the sentences out loud as well.

Off you go.

Great job team.

Let's see how you've done then.

Our answers should include: in Victorian times, not all children went to school.

In particular, if you're a child from the lower class or a poor background, you probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to go to school.

This is because in Victorian times, some children had to work.

Whether you lived in a city or in a rural area, in the countryside, there was always work for young children.

This work would've been poorly paid and might have been very tough.

Indeed, it could even have been dangerous.

We've looked already at some of the jobs that children may have done, such as sweeping streets.

And in the next learning cycle, we're going to look at even more jobs and we're gonna be considering some really dangerous jobs as well.

Children needed to work to help their family earn money.

Children from the poorest backgrounds in particular had to support their families to buy the essentials, such as food.

These children weren't from wealthy families.

These families perhaps wouldn't have been able to buy the essentials like food without the money that the children and their family were providing.

These were hard times.

So, we've considered why Victorian children had to work.

The fact that during a large period of the Victorian era, many children didn't have the opportunity to go to school and they had to go to work to help support their families.

In the next learning cycle, we're going to consider what work Victorian children did.

We're going to look in more detail at some of the incredibly dangerous jobs that children were expected to do.

So there were many different jobs that children could do in Victorian times.

We know the types of jobs that children can do from historical sources.

Remember, a source is a thing that tells us about the past.

It gives us evidence.

Sources include paintings, illustrations, and photographs, as well as written sources of evidence from the time.

Things like letters, newspapers, and diaries.

Here we can see a painting of work by the Victorian artist Ford Madox Brown.

Paintings of Victorian life like this one are sources of evidence.

From this painting, we can carefully unpick and see some of the jobs that people in Victorian times did.

And indeed, in this picture, in this image, we can see some of the jobs that Victorian children may have had to do.

We can see the navvies building the road.

We can see some orphan children.

We can see some wealthy people.

And if we look carefully to the left, we can see a young lady selling flowers.

In Victorian times, many factories opened in cities all around the country.

This was an age of radical change.

These factories housed machines that were powered by steam and that could increase production of materials, like cotton, metal, and matchsticks.

Factories needed lots of people, including men, women and children to work in them to maintain the machines and to produce goods.

Children were useful because they were small enough to squeeze into places that were hard to reach for cleaning.

Compared to adults, children are a lot smaller and they could squeeze into the cracks and crevices between machines.

When things became jammed, they could go in and take out the things that were jamming the machines.

We can see here a painting of women and children working in a cotton factory.

These machines could become jammed with pieces of cotton and it would be the children that will be sent in to take out anything that was jamming them.

This could be incredibly dangerous as the machine might then kick back into action and a child might lose a limb.

The children, they were desperate for work and to provide for their family, and they had no other choices in many cases.

In the countryside, groups of children called gangs worked on farms. So not only was their work found in the cities where the new factories were built, but also in the countryside.

This was a difficult and tiring job.

We can see here an illustration of a child fainting in a field because they're exhausted from the work that they had to do on the farm.

This was tough, backbreaking work.

Picking things, planting seeds, and the leaders of the farms and the leaders of these gangs would make the children work long and tough hours with very few breaks.

This is a really useful historical source here.

It's from the Victorian era and it shows us that children became very unwell because they worked hard for many hours a day.

This and many other jobs were dangerous for children.

So, working in a city in a factory was dangerous as you might have to crawl into a machine to take something blocking it out.

But also working in the countryside was also dangerous because you might be worked to exhaustion.

You might become very tired and unwell.

Which jobs did children do in the Victorian times? Did they work in factories, help on farms, work as chimney sweeps, or work in coal mines? Think about the jobs that we've looked at and that I've spoken about so far.

Pause the video and select all the jobs that children did in Victorian times now.

Off you go.

Great job.

You've clearly been paying a lot of attention.

Some of these jobs really are found and we can't imagine making children doing today, can we? But life in the Victorian era is very different.

So children actually did all of these jobs.

They could work in factories and cities.

They could work on farms in the countryside.

They could work as chimney sweeps and be thrust up to clean out the soot in the chimney, and they could also work in mines such as coal mines.

All of these jobs could be very dangerous for children.

They could work long hours and they wouldn't have been paid very much money, but they were desperate to provide for their families.

So in Victorian times, coal was burned for heating was also burned to provide power to the steam engines that powered factories.

Coal is a rock that's found deep underground and is dug up in special places called mines.

My turn, your turn, mines.

Mines are deep underground and in the Victorian era, were very dangerous.

Children worked in mines because they were small enough to crawl inside the long dark tunnels to bring out the coal from underground.

Do you see a pattern emerging here? Children were very useful in factories and in mines because of their size, because they were smaller.

Here we can see an illustration of a child worker pulling a coal tub in a coal mine.

This looks like cramped, claustrophobic, and incredibly dangerous.

The mine shaft could collapse.

The child could hurt their back from pulling the heavy coal.

This doesn't look like a safe or nice job for a child to be doing.

Wealthy people who lived in a large house usually had at least one open coal fire with a chimney in their home.

Remember that coal could be burned for power, but also for heating, to warm up a house.

Children then, were small enough again to work as, my turn, your turn, chimney sweeps.

This meant that the children would have to crawl up the chimney, that place from which the smoke exited the house from the burning coal, and they would have to clean them out.

You can see here a painting of a chimney sweep from the Victorian era.

Notice how his face is covered in dark soot.

His clothes are covered in dark soot as well.

This would've been incredibly unhealthy and bad for your lungs.

The soot could get into your lungs when you breathed in.

Not a nice job to have done.

But again, because children were small enough and they were desperate for money to provide for their families, they had to provide these services.

Can you match the questions to the answers? Where does coal come from? What was coal used for? What did some children work as? The answers are chimney sweeps, mines and heating.

Pause the video, match the questions to the answers now.

Off you go.

Great job team.

You are clearly really paying attention in the previous slides.

So where does coal come from? Well it comes from deep inside the ground and is taken from mines.

Well done.

What was coal used for? One of the key things it was used for in wealthy households was for heating, it would be burnt in an open fireplace.

As a result, the smoke from the burning coal would go up a chimney.

And that meant that some children had to work as chimney sweeps because they were small enough to crawl up these chimney stacks and clean out the dark soot that would build up in them.

What a horrible job.

So for our practise now, what I'd like us to consider is the fact that in Victorian times, many jobs were done by children because they were small enough to fit into small spaces.

What examples of jobs can you think of that we've looked at that children had to do in the Victorian era? Share your ideas and describe your examples with a learning partner.

Consider what jobs children did, consider where they did the jobs, whether they were in the countryside or in a city.

Were they taking place in factories? Were they taking place in households? Were these nice jobs? Were they safe for the children? Did they receive much money? And why were the children having to do these jobs? Pause the video now.

Have a discussion with someone around you or with me, and make sure you describe your examples.

Off you go, team.

Incredible work.

I'm so impressed.

You've clearly soaked up so much knowledge from this lesson.

Well, yes.

In the Victorian era or Victorian times, many jobs were done by children because they were small enough to fit into small spaces.

Remember also that their families were desperate for money to buy things like food, so they would send their children off to work.

Remember too that during the early part of the Victorian period, education was not compulsory.

I've asked you to think about what examples of jobs you could think of.

Your answers could have included: some children were chimney sweeps.

They climbed up the narrow chimneys, cleaning the soot from coal fires.

Yeah, absolutely.

This coal had to come from mines, didn't it? Which is also a place that children would work.

They had to work down the mines.

They would pull tubs of coal along the small tunnels from deep underground because they were small enough to fit down the tunnels.

Remember too, that children could also work in factories as they were small enough to creep between the machines when they became blocked and take things out.

This was incredibly dangerous.

Also, children would working the countryside as part of farming gangs.

They worked long and hard hours and often became unwell from exhaustion.

Brilliant, I loved hearing your answers there.

So in today's lesson, we've been thinking about Victorian childhood.

Victorian childhood was very different to childhood today.

In Victorian times, not all children went to school.

Instead, many children worked to earn money.

There was also a huge disparity between the education of the wealthy children and the education of the poor children in the Victorian era.

Children did many different jobs, and we know about this because of historical sources of evidence.

Consider those images that we've looked at today that we've used as sources to tell us about the different types of jobs that children had to do during the Victorian era.

Children worked in factories, on farms, as chimney sweeps, and even in coal mines.

Jobs were often very hard and sometimes incredibly dangerous too.

Children were used for some jobs because of their small size.

Keep up the great history learning and I'll see you again soon.